Intimacy updated

Posted on | February 9, 2012 | 3 Comments

I finally finished my course outline and reader! I am teaching “Intimacy, Love & Friendship” back-to-back this semester, because the second half of the year I will be on sabbatical.

There are some changes to the content this time around, although not as many as I was going to make. The feedback was too good!

Additions include:

- Sherry Turkle, Alone Together. A great book for teaching – her writing is clear and motivated, and has the benefit of long term observation across different studies. While her arguments aren’t popular with some of the digerati (please send me more reviews if you know of them), she makes use of cultural theories I use in other parts of the course, e.g. Goffman and some classic psychoanalysis. Having this applied so directly to intimacy is a gift.

- Password intimacy: This story broke at the right time. I’ve decided to teach with it instead of The Social Network for another year. Although the assignment last term was fun, I don’t think I can expect students to get their head around film analysis as well as the critical content of the course. Too many variables.

- To talk about privacy, I’ve taught Emily Nussbaum’s article for several years now, but it’s not quite helping students move beyond generational stereotypes… or tech-determinist approaches to history. This can be a bad combination and I worry that the article leads them to both, even though in my view it remains a brilliant, sympathetic piece of journalism.

Christina Nippert Eng wrote a fabulous and influential book, Home and Work: Negotiating Boundaries Through Everyday Life back in 1996. Her new book, Islands of Privacy: Selective Concealment and Disclosure in Everyday Life, is just as exciting as a complement to some of danah’s work.

“When you are breaking up, the medium is part of the message”, writes Illana Gershon, in The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media. One of her strongest insights is that all the emphasis on connection in new media commentary overlooks how technologies facilitate “new forms of disconnection”. While her sample demographic is limited – like many scholars in this field, she writes about her own students – in a teaching context this presents an opportunity for self-reflexivity (one hopes).

Amidst a range of interesting observations about Facebook, Gershon notes how broken-hearted girls use their profiles to perform resilience. (This adds momentum to some of the things we were highlighting in our Facebook paper, I think). Following a break-up, students feign happiness in their status updates, post staged photos of going out and having fun, and ask male friends to fake flirt on their wall – all for the ex to witness. An example:

The worst part is having to make all my statuses so darn happy. Even though I’m glad this is over, I’m still a little sad, you know? Hurt… angry… the typical post-breakup emotions. But instead of saying “Kathy is sad and hurt and sick of assholes,” I have to be all, “Kathy can’t wait for the weekend!” or some lie like that because he’s probably looking. And he probably wants me to be sad and hurt and angry and he probably wants to take great satisfaction in knowing that he’s the one who caused all that. And I absolutely refuse to give him that satisfaction. The next part of my master Facebook plan is to have friends take a ton of pictures of me this weekend looking like I’m having an absolutely wonderful time doing whatever we’re doing. Then I’ll make a new album with some random name that implies an inside joke he isn’t part of, and it’ll be great except for the fact that I’ll probably still feel like crap. However, my Facebook page will portray me as a bundle of happiness and joy, and that is all that matters. (186)

I’ve added Gershon to a new week on intimate media, mourning and death. Heavy! More on the rest of the course soon.

Category: Teaching

Week Two – Style

Posted on | February 8, 2012 | 1 Comment

So much for people wanting to talk more online! It makes me sad when blogging is all broadcast. Well, I will continue posting these anyway, in case there are people following and interested.

This week’s readings for Queer Thinking are as follows:

Melissa Hardie, “The Closet Remediated: Inside Lindsay Lohan,” Australian Humanities Review, May 2010.

(optional: “Beard,” in Rhetorical Bodies, eds. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999)

Lee Wallace, “Dorothy Arzner’s Wife: Heterosexual sets, homosexual scenes,” Screen 49:4 Winter 2008.

Kate Lilley, Ladylike, Salt Publishing, forthcoming. (Latest book of poems)

Kate Lilley, “Lesbian Professor,” Australian Feminist Studies, 11:23 1996

(optional: “Early Modern Garbo: the Two Bodies of Queen Christina” in Women Making Time, eds E. McMahon and B. Olubas Perth: UWA Press, 2006, 16-35)

I have copies of all of these to email anyone who would like to follow our thinking…

Category: Gender, Reading, Sexuality

Facebook, binge drinking, young women

Posted on | February 5, 2012 | 1 Comment

I’ve just uploaded a revised version of “The Pedagogy of Regret: Facebook, binge drinking and young women” a paper co-authored with one of our GCS graduate students, Rebecca Brown.

I’m so grateful to Rebecca for her work on this and the experience of collaborating together. It’s taught me a lot about the difficulty of writing interdisciplinary analysis – and reminded me of the challenges in producing internet research beyond social sciences paradigms. I really value the determination and imagination Becky is showing in bringing together different disciplinary influences in her PhD work, which this paper has developed from.

Unfortunately in the process of peer review we were asked to remove the song lyrics we originally included in the paper. (I hadn’t realised that copyright was so strict… and have had song lyrics published in the same journal before). Anyway, when reading, know that we originally wanted this as our main intertextual reference. Lily says it better than us.

Category: Gender, Publications, Research, Web studies

Reading group reflections

Posted on | February 5, 2012 | 4 Comments

Here is an open thread for people wanting to continue or join the discussion from this week’s Queer Thinking group. Our readings were:

Annamarie Jagose “Feminism’s Queer Theory,” Feminism and Psychology 19.2 (2009): 157-74.

Annamarie Jagose “Couterfeit Pleasures: Fake Orgasm and Queer Agency,” Textual Practice 24.3 (2010): 517-39.

Sara Ahmed “Sexual Orientations” in Queer Phenomenology, Duke UP (2006).

Feel free to jump in with thoughts and reflections. I will post the coming week’s readings separately.

NB: The discussion can happen through “comments” (firstly by clicking on the comment link below the title of this post). Or if you have longer reflections I can post them as a separate entry on your behalf.

Category: Gender, Reading, Sexuality

Queer Thinking preparations

Posted on | January 31, 2012 | 3 Comments

Plans are well underway for this year’s Queer Thinking events. As was the case last year, the Sexuality and Space Group at Sydney is teaming up with New Mardi Gras to bring a special guest speaker for the weekend. This year it is the brilliant Professor Sara Ahmed. Sara is a regular visitor to the GCS Department and is immensely popular with our students. Her public lecture, Willful Queers, is on Saturday night, 25th Feb, at the Seymour Centre.

Also, on Friday 24th, Kane and I are organising an all day workshop, ‘Researching intimacy, sexuality and space’ at The University of Sydney. It will feature a series of speakers from Sydney and elsewhere, and finishes with a public forum with Sara and others debating “Why Gender Matters.”

Full details of the line-up will be available shortly. For now, I wanted to mention that in preparation for the Friday event we are running a weekly reading and discussion group that people here may wish to follow online or come along and join.

We’ve decided to group the discussions under three themes that relate to the Friday program and the drawcard speakers – Annamarie Jagose, Kate Lilley, Melissa Hardie, Lee Wallace, Kane Race, Elspeth Probyn and Sara. The readings will give a good sense of each speaker’s background and key ideas, and we will use the meetings to discuss how their work and the different lineages relate to each other – and to the field.

Here’s how it will look:

Week 1 – Sex (AMJ)
Week 2 – Style (KL, MH, LW)
Week 3 – Space (SA, KR, EP)

The themes are broad but from each we will get a chance to discuss 1) politics of queer/sex/identity 2) aesthetics and style – especially in cultural forms 3) theories of space, embodiment, belonging, scenes.

If you are interested in coming along to one or several of these we will meet on campus each week starting this Friday (3rd) at 3pm. Both Kane and I will be there and possibly other faculty depending on availability.

The following readings are the starting point for this week’s meeting:

Annamarie Jagose “Feminism’s Queer Theory,” Feminism and Psychology 19.2 (2009): 157-74.
Annamarie Jagose “Couterfeit Pleasures: Fake Orgasm and Queer Agency,” Textual Practice 24.3 (2010): 517-39.
Sara Ahmed “Sexual Orientations” in Queer Phenomenology, Duke UP (2006).

Get in touch to find out more…

Category: Academia, Events, Gender, Sexuality

Mad Men revised

Posted on | January 30, 2012 | No Comments

My updated paper on Mad Men (following peer review) is now available here. What a great experience this time – some really helpful reports. But I am keen to hear any more feedback before submitting the final version. I’m still not quite happy with the conclusion and wonder if it is to do with the problematic of class in relation to “Occupy”… As one reader has already noticed, what would Draper think? Which scenes give us the best indication? It may not matter but it might make a nice resolution to the discussion.

I am also conscious of being heavily influenced from having just finished Andrew Ross’s latest book, Bird on Fire. This fantastic and important work covers so much that I can’t manage to address in this piece: property speculation, migration, climate change, gender and racism. It’s what I have in mind when I try to link the forms of biomediated calculation that service our online experiences as much as our credit rating.

I’ll post more about Andrew’s book another soon; I just mention it here to signal how much the financial crisis seems tied to what I’m describing as ‘the waning of the commute’. Put another way: there are suburbs, and then there are suburbs.

Category: Cultural Studies, Publications, Viewing

Surveillance and Everyday Life

Posted on | January 18, 2012 | 2 Comments

Sydney University’s Surveillance and Everyday Life project is running a two day conference next month, and the program (pdf) has just been announced.

Looks like I’m speaking on day two. The paper is something I’m working on for a collection on ‘identity technologies’ edited by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak.

This is one of a series of pieces inspired by teaching my course, Intimacy, Love and Friendship, which runs again this semester. I welcome input and more examples! Details below.

All in your hands: Smart phones, intimacy and adultery

This paper explores emerging practices of intimacy, publicity and privacy evident in a range of mobile media applications, particularly those that facilitate and obscure adulterous behaviour. The forms of surveillance imagined through these technology designs, and their gendered assumptions, will be features of the analysis. The paper draws together a history of writing on love and flirtation, theories of intimacy and friendship, and empirical studies of mobile media – including research conducted by the author on technology use among white collar professionals. In this framework, smart phones are shown to reflect the vulnerabilities of contemporary relationships as much as their changing function. If mobile technologies provide an infrastructure to relieve the tensions inherent in normative coupledom today, they also hold the potential to refigure our sense of domesticity’s function, most obviously in terms of the link between physical proximity and intimacy. The surveillance capacities of new media devices here offer insights into emerging models of friendship, sexual ethics and care.

Category: Academia, Gender, Research, Sexuality

Orientation

Posted on | January 16, 2012 | No Comments

An impressive new post at Music for Deckchairs takes on an extreme case in recent university marketing strategies – no doubt expressing some of the reservations others may feel in the lead up to a new academic semester. It reminds me of the remarkable experience I had heading out for lunch outside the Quadrangle at Sydney last year, only to witness a massive jumping castle and fairground ride perched on the front lawn. (I think there was free fairy floss that day too?) In contrast to the dunking case, the Sydney event was sponsored by the student union. Do these things happen elsewhere too? What have they got to do with students enrolling and coming to class?

Category: Academia

Flux or precarity? It depends who you write for

Posted on | January 14, 2012 | 4 Comments

Two articles I read this week offer contrasting insights into the state of the work world at present. One is from a notorious business cheerleader, one is from a Leftist magazine, but it seems to me they are writing about the same thing.

The first piece, coming out in next month’s Fast Company, describes Generation Flux, or “GenFlux”. It profiles a crop of successful urban professionals apparently delirious from their encounter with the outlet’s styling and grooming team. These icons of new industries share thoughts on the future of business – though “There Are No Perfect Role Models” in this chaotic new landscape. Still, readers are encouraged to turn to these informants for guidance at a time when “our visibility about the future is declining”. In classic Who Moved My Cheese logic, the article announces:

The entire world of business is now in a constant state of agile development. New releases are constant; tweaks, upgrades, and course corrections take place on the fly. There is no status quo; there is only a process of change.

Successful fluxers are those prepared for constant impermanence, who embrace instability without fear:

The new reality is multiple gigs, some of them supershort… with constant pressure to learn new things and adapt to new work situations, and no guarantee that you’ll stay in a single industry. It can be daunting. It can be exhausting. It can also be exhilarating.

This passage links to a further article on The Four Year Career, part of the issue’s broader showcase of admirable go-getters.

Adrenaline fuelled work worlds promising constant challenges for thrill-seekers are generically familiar to anyone who remembers No Collar – Andrew Ross’s study of the glamorised workaholism that fed the dot.com boom. In the latest vision however “government, schools, and other institutions that have defined how we’ve lived” are now described as “legacy institutions… the expectation that these systems provide safety and stability is a trap”.

The message of the article is clear: individuals need to equip themselves with the skills and know-how to survive what is a Darwinian drama. Constant stimulus is “the new normal”. Hear how the story moralises against resistance:

Nostalgia is a natural human emotion, a survival mechanism that pushes people to avoid risk by applying what we’ve learned and relying on what’s worked before. It’s also about as useful as an appendix right now. When times seem uncertain, we instinctively become more conservative; we look to the past, to times that seem simpler, and we have the urge to re-create them. This impulse is as true for businesses as for people. But when the past has been blown away by new technology, by the ubiquitous and always-on global hypernetwork, beloved past practices may well be useless.

The second piece from Dissent magazine takes as its subject the rise of the not-for-profit Freelancers’ Union in the US. Running out of Brooklyn, the organisation has seen considerable growth in its seven year lifespan, no doubt partly due to the unstable work conditions outlined above. But rather than flux, writer Atossa Araxia Abrahamian defines today’s work environment as one of “precariousness”:

The General Accounting Office estimates that 30 percent of the U.S. workforce is “contingent” — meaning freelance; temporary; and, most significantly, taxed differently from employees and not entitled to such benefits as health insurance, retirement, paid vacation, even weekends. Job turnover in the United States is also astoundingly high: according to some accounts, 45 percent of the American workforce will switch jobs within a year.

The article uses Guy Standing’s typology to explain how precarity affects workers differently according to education, income, class and cultural background. This welcome observation is crucial for gaining a handle on the complexity of compensation claims for contingent labour – especially in the creative economy.

The piece also gives a useful overview of the way “flexibility” has been used in recent organisational culture. The morphology this term has taken is a fantastic case study in the power of sliding signification chains. The article concludes that individual work styles (and the impossibility of imagining self-less solidarity?) lock employers and freelancers alike into a mutually beneficial, if simultaneously risky, “flexonomy”.

Taken together, we might read these articles as alternative takes on the same structural problem – the increasingly mainstream experience of non-permanent work. But one reads as a celebration, another a lament. Is this not one way of witnessing the difference between right and left wing economic views more generally? Does the performative effect of embracing change over nostalgia ultimately wield more power than the defeatist language of precarity? This is something I wonder at the moment, as I work on a chapter for a new collection called Theorising Cultural Work.

According to Safian, GenFlux “is less a demographic designation than a psychographic one”. Not all workers will join the movement, whose members are defined by “a mind-set that embraces instability, that tolerates–and even enjoys–recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions”. The trouble is, avoiding the movement is likely to result in the very outcomes described so vividly in the Dissent piece: management forcing permanent staff out of work, only to re-advertise the same jobs without secure conditions. (If this can happen to journalists, I wonder how much longer we will wait for it to happen on a wide scale to academics).

I guess the intended audience for the two pieces also hints at the significant distinction between those who get to choose flux and those who don’t. Certainly the decision not to invest in workers for the long term is the one choice high-flying contract-based managers are increasingly willing to make. Of course, this is not the only way to respond to operational pressures. But it is likely to be an all too common response to reading hyped-up articles in publications like Fast Company.

[Thanks to Courtney and JW for original links to the articles]

Category: Reading

Willunga Connects – public release

Posted on | January 12, 2012 | No Comments

This time a year ago I was heading off to Willunga, South Australia, to study the roll-out of the Australian Government’s National Broadband Network.

Just before Christmas, the South Australian Government’s Department of Further Education, Employment, Science and Technology released the public report on our findings.

This is the only research of its kind that took place at the point of implementation at one of the five first release sites. Its recommendations therefore have relevance for ongoing stages of the project, just as they give insight into attitudes about the NBN among ‘ordinary’ Australians.

In addition to the cultural analysis of the town, a feature of the report is the survey of 422 Willunga school students that we conducted towards the end of the study. This offers some interesting new data on young people’s use of online technology.

You can download the report here, or let me know if you would like a hard copy.